Harvard professor Joseph Nye and former Assistant Secretary of State Richard Armitage briefed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week on their Smart Power initiative. Joe Nye has been writing about smart power and its earlier version soft power since The “smart power” concept was first introduced to the Senate Foreign Relations committee by Admiral […]
Sunday marked the two year anniversary since the International Criminal Court issued its first arrest warrants against Sudanese officials suspected of war crimes in Darfur. To mark the occasion, Facebook (yes, Facebook) launched “Wanted for War Crimes Watch List” application to its users. The point of the project is to generate public awareness along the […]
I touched on an important subject here earlier in the month when I mentioned a new study purporting that the spread of black carbon , or soot , from industrial and transportation sources, and from developing world cooking practices, is having a significantly more potent impact on climate change than previously thought. This release from […]
Today is the sixteenth anniversary of the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan. As Ghosts of Alexander reminds us the United States finds itself battling the radical sentiment it helped proliferate to fight the Soviets. Pakistan's President Musharraf, addressing the 88th National Management Course, noted the growing extremism , which he fears "the spread of Talibansation beyond […]
Michael Gerson, George W. Bush's former speechwriter, spent his twice-weekly Washington Post column this Friday offering advice to the next US President on the virtues of unilateralism. Gerson begins by tuning his argument to the conservative ear: “In their total war for the right to be dubbed the peace candidate Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack […]
Nice article in World Mag (Today's News, Christian Views) about work being done by Engineers Without Borders. As a case study it works well, but EWB also makes a very good argument for building local ownership of projects. Towards the end the article gets a little bit weird, as the author takes issue with EWB's […]
More teenage mothers emerge in Texas polygamy probe according to Texas authorities said on April 24th, as they identified 25 more mothers under the age of 18 among those removed from a polygamist compound. There are some 460 minors at the center of what has become the states largest child abuse investigation in history A […]
KPMG is a global network of auditors and business consultants operating in 145 countries. According to the new Climate Changes Your Business report from them, six industries in particular have to watch out because they are not sufficiently aware of and ready to manage the risks of global warming. The winners (or potential losers) are: […]
Reading this AP article about a Credit Suisse banker who was arrested in Brazil for helping rich Brazilians escape their own taxes reminded me of a panel discussion I heard last year. The link has audio for all the speakers, and I particularly recommend Raymond Baker's presentation. Basically there are a hundreds of billions of […]
Today April 25th is World Malaria Day, spearheaded by the Roll Back Malaria campaign, which was launched in 1998 by the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the World Bank. Malaria continues to kill more than a million people every year, mostly children, and […]
"Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them." – James Arthur Baldwin Children follow the path that we set for them, they look to their elders for examples and guidance. As we have all too often seen, as with the children's poll I mentioned […]
Talk of HIV/AIDS in South Africa is nothing new, nor is the scale at which it affects children in the country, where the epidemic is one of the worst in the world. According to the, 'the Demographic Impact of HIV/AIDS in South Africa – National and Provincial Indicators for 2006′ report,estimates that almost half of […]
Read this wire article on recent congressional testimony by Oxfam and try to determine what Oxfam is actually recommending that Congress do. It's tough. My guess is the author didn't understand what the testimony was saying. But the testimony is well worth a read. They got it right, but probably mixed terms in a confusing […]
The Washington, DC-based Brookings Institute and the University of Bern's Project on on Internal Displacement has released an interesting report focusing on how to fuse human rights with US foreign policy. The author is Roberta Cohen, who, among her impressive credentials in the field of human rights, was Deputy Assistant Secretary for Human Rights at […]
General Petraeus has been tapped to be the new commander of Central Command and his current deputy, Lt-Gen Ray Odierno will succeed him as Commanding General, Multi-National Force – Iraq. It's interesting to note that like most generals in the army, both men do not have combat experience as infantrymen. When I was a soldier […]